


The Garden of the Nightingale

by Rosie_Rues



Category: Fairy Tales (trad)
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:Cyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:38:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosie_Rues/pseuds/Rosie_Rues





	The Garden of the Nightingale

On the morning that the emperor fell ill, Ying the kitchen maid left the little cottage on the shore where she lived with her sick mother, and made her way through the gardens to the palace. It was a long quiet walk, which she made every day, up through dunes planted with fragrant plants and past groves of bamboo. She crossed laughing streams over red-painted bridges and traced her way through pine groves hung with tiny bells until she came to the great water gardens, where delicate walkways passed a bare finger's breadth above the water, so that it seemed that she walked on the very lily pads. From the lakes, she then climbed up the terraces of roses and orchids, cherry trees and flowering plums.

On the fourth terrace she found the gardener's boy, Gen, leaning on his rake and gazing out towards the farthest reaches of the gardens. Ying had heard that even the head gardener did not know how far the gardens reached. Travellers told stories of vast and distant forests beyond the gardens, mountains that kissed the skies and streams that ran with the colours of the rainbow.

"The flowers are dying," Gen said, bowing in greeting.

"I am sorry," Ying said. She had been the one to tell the imperial court where the nightingale could be found, and the one to persuade the nightingale to sing for the emperor.

The nightingale had been gone for seven years now, and all the birds in China had flown away with it.

Without the birds, the gardens were dying, flower by flower, tree by tree.

"You did not banish the nightingale," Gen said fiercely, digging his rake into the dark soil.

"No," Ying said uncertainly, thinking of the golden cage and the silken strings the nightingale had assented to, and the new roof the emperor had ordered for her mother's cottage and the good food they now received.

"It was not your fault," Gen said and turned her round so she faced the palace again. "Now go. See to your duty."

So she climbed the rest of the way to the porcelain palace, following the little sunken paths that allowed the gardeners to tend to this part of the garden without ever spoiling the serenity of the emperor's view with their presence.

Inside the palace, all was cool and dim. Secret breezes ran from cunningly constructed windows and every meeting of corridors was decorated by a fountain dancing with clear water. The walls were painted with shining symbols and graceful metal birds hung from every ceiling, their wings chiming in the breeze.

As Ying approached the kitchen, she was startled to hear the song of the metal nightingale echoing through the halls.

Wide-eyed, she crept around a corner to peer into the Imperial chambers. It was only three months since the metal bird had last sung for the court, and its mechanism would not stand use more than once a year.

But when she peeped through the door, it was clear that the sound was coming from the Emperor's chambers. Furthermore, to her confusion, the polished marble floors had all been covered with soft cloths and the golden bells and chimes of this wing wrapped in silk.

Troubled, Ying hurried onwards to the kitchens, where she learned that the emperor was gravely ill.

"Only the sound of the mechanical nightingale will soothe him," one of the cooks told her.

"He weeps when it stops singing," another added.

"Cries out to ghosts and spirits," continued a third.

"It's a tragedy!" cried the butler. "What will become of us without him? Oh, why must good men die?"

"All men die," intoned the pastry chef glumly. "Good men are merely missed more."

"He might survive," said Ying.

All the cooks looked at her and, as one, heaved a sorrowful sigh.

All day long she was busy scrubbing pots and cleaning china as the cooks strived to create something which would tempt the emperor to eat. Each dish, however, came back barely touched, prompting new lamentations in the kitchen.

Ying kept scrubbing sadly. She did not blame the emperor for the disappearance of the birds. In his fifty years, he had never travelled beyond the terraces outside the palace. He governed every hour of his life, and she believed that he would not know how to live in a world without laws. He could never have understood the nightingale.

She made her way home slowly that night, walking down towards the pink and silver dusk. At the water garden, where the quiet ponds gleamed like mercury in the evening light, she found Gen up to his waist in water, clearing dead lilies.

"The emperor is dying," she said, standing on the bridge, her feet level with the water.

"Perhaps that will bring the birds back," Gen suggested, looking up at her.

"Perhaps," Ying said, but hoped that wouldn't be the way the story ended.

That night, the mechanical nightingale failed again, springs and cogs bursting out from beneath its glittering wings. The next morning, Ying peered into the emperor's chambers only to see him stretched out white and stiff on his velvet-draped bed. There was a shadow crouching over his heart, with a face as pale and hard as bone.

Ying whirled around and ran out of the palace into the gardens, forgetting the kitchen and the pots she should be cleaning and the silver she should be polishing.

She ran across the gravel terraces and through the formal gardens where roses bloomed. When she found Gen she paused for a second, calling to him, "I am going to the land beyond the garden to find the nightingale! Will you come with me?"

"Yes," said Gen, and he left his rake and shovel and hoe to take her hand and hurry with her across the great gardens.

They walked for hours, until the sky grew dim and their feet grew sore. Then they drank from a bubbling stream and ate fruit from the fruit bushes that grew in this region of the garden and lay themselves down to sleep below a blossoming cherry tree.

The petals from the cheery blossom drifted down to cover them as they slept, and in the morning they continued onwards, through the strange and beautiful extremes of the garden. Here they found plants from every region of the known world: stately oaks and gaudy melon-flowers, daffodils and banana plants. They found too gardeners who had never seen the porcelain palace, who greeted them as travellers from a distant land, and wept into their beards to hear of the emperor's suffering.

On the third morning, they reached the edge of the garden. The land had been growing steeper since they set out that dawn, but now it soared into rocky mountains, thickly covered with forest. The sigh of the wind through the trees was as loud as the surf on the shore by Ying's cottage.

"Do you really think we'll find the nightingale in there?" Ying asked. The forest was dim and shadowy and wilder than anywhere she had ever seen.

"I don't know," Gen whispered, but then tensed. "Listen!"

Ying obeyed, letting the sound of the trees roll over her. At last she began to hear other noises under the roar - creaking branches and rushing water and shrill, busy birdsong.

"There are birds in the trees," Gen murmured.

Hand in hand, they walked into the forest.

Many and strange were the sights they saw under those lofty trees. Of every creature they met, from the gentle qilin to the blazing phoenix, Ying asked the whereabouts of the nightingale. And every answer was the same: "Further in."

At dusk, they finally found the little grey nightingale, perched in high branches above a silver pool. She was singing to the sunset, her voice warbling out, far more beautiful than the orderly song of the metal bird.

"Nightingale," Ying called respectfully at a break in the song. "We have come to ask you to come back to the palace. The emperor needs you."

"The emperor sent me away," the nightingale sang sadly. "I did not sing by his rules. He has a better bird now."

"The metal bird is broken," Ying said. "It cannot sing."

"And when it is mended, he will send me away again."

"The gardens are dying without the birds," Gen tried. "If you lead them back, there will be life again."

"We are happy here, where the trees grow freely. Why should we return to an emperor who will not even ask us back himself?"

"If he was free to leave the palace," Ying said gently, "he would not be an emperor. Furthermore, he cannot come."

"Why not? Why not?" trilled the nightingale.

"He is dying," Ying said. "And there is no living creature there to comfort him, only ghosts and machines."

"Oh, oh, oh!" the nightingale cried and then spread her grey wings. As Ying watched, she flew up and away, back towards the palace, and all the birds in the forest took flight and followed her, their voices echoing sweetly against the darkening sky.

And in the morning, Ying and Gen followed them back to the palace, where they lived happily ever after in the newly blooming gardens.

  



End file.
